The musings, opinions, thoughts, and complaints of a political minded Canadian citizen.

Wednesday, September 3, 2014

Why We Need a Guaranteed Annual Income.

It's been a
little while since we last sat down and talked, so I'd like to take the
opportunity now to correct that and try to move the conversation forward a
little bit. As I mentioned when I posted that we would be re-engaging the blog,
there's a lot of issues going on in our world right now and all of them are
worthy of talking about.
From the situation in Ukraine, the escalation of conflict between Israel and
Gaza, or even latest poll numbers federally here for our own parties, there is
certainly no shortage of things to talk about.
But, as is my want, I find myself gravitating towards an abstract big picture
post rather than the current event one. And so with that in mind, I'd like to
talk about an issue that has been creeping up on social media and other areas
that hasn't received a lot of mainstream media coverage. And that is the issue
of the guaranteed annual income.
There's been a lot of talk, mostly revolving around the social determinants of
health, about the need to establish a guaranteed annual income (GAI). There's
also been references to the 1970s sample trial in Dauphin, Manitoba and the
successes that came out of that social experiment.
We've talked a bit about work before on the blog, and not all of this is going
to be new ideas. In fact, some of this may very well be repeating myself.
However, I feel that in order to fully expand on this idea we need to recover
ground that we may have already tread.
I would first like to start by calling attention to the asbestos mines of
Quebec. Several summers ago there was mass panic in some Quebec communities
over the worry that the federal government was about to sign on to deal that
would basically kill off asbestos mining in the province. Naturally, there were
photo ops for the Prime Minister and relevant ministers to visit Asbestos and
declare their support for the workers in the community.
It's a photo opportunity as old as time: coming out in support of established
jobs, condemning (to a degree) the modernization of the trade market and its
necessity to put products to bed after a period of time; which is always
surprising coming from conservatives, given their attitudes towards free-market
competition and the free hand of the marketplace determine what is and is no
longer necessary product, but that's a conversation for another time.
You may ask, I thought we were talking about a guaranteed annual income why you
ranting about asbestos mines? The purpose of that is to highlight a very real
truth about the capitalist marketplace economy: as we move forward both
industrially and technologically, established jobs often are lost in the
process.
So a community, like Asbestos, may go through turbulent changes due to the
ever-changing nature of the market economy. No one likes to talk about jobs
disappearing; in fact as a politician it's political suicide to even go to a
community and say that 20 years from now the jobs that your fathers and
grandfathers had no will longer exist.
People like safe, they like familiar. Which is why when the market fluctuates
and creates these changes there's always demand do something about. Communities
are always hit hard because despite the world moving forward, many of these
places have remained in an economic time bubble. They commit to jobs that are
disappearing, and at the same time they're pushing younger workers to take over
these jobs. Sooner or later they find these younger workers are now competing
for fewer and fewer jobs as the market shrinks in that industry.
Compounding this issue, and making it subsequently worse, is the fact that many
of these jobs that are disappearing due to changing economic market
circumstances are high-paying, have benefits and will establish a young
person's life. It is not just a job, it is a career and many of these are disappearing.
In return, what we're seeing every time one of these jobs disappear, is that
their replacement is not a career but a job. I'm talking part time, I'm talking
precarious employment situations, contract work with no guarantee of extension.
I'm talking no health benefits, no savings towards retirement. We are pushing
an entire generation out of well-paying jobs and into the complete and other
mercy of an economic market that has already proven over several decades that
it is anything but merciful.
And to make matters worse we are pushing them into an unstable service economy.
Now, I suppose some of you are asking what is an unstable service economy? Let
me provide you with a clear example: I want to think about the last time you
went to the grocery store. Now, when you're standing in line when you reach the
end of that line is there a person standing behind the till or are you in line
at the self-checkout machines?
I'm not attacking self-checkout machines, I actually quite like them as I find
that they reduce the wait time in line substantially. What I am doing with this
is illustrating a point: our marketplace is changing substantially, even
something as simple and as reliable as our service economy is changing the
methods in which service is provided to the consumer.
Fifteen or twenty years from now, the grocery stores of tomorrow are going to
look a lot different. Instead of only three or four self-checkout machines they
will be the vast majority with maybe only one or two lanes of actual human
cashiers (and even I think that's optimistic as I believe the number of actual
honest-to-goodness human beings will be working in a cashier capacity will be
closer to zero). One need only look to markets like Japan where automation and
technology are rapidly replacing human beings in the service economy, these are
jobs that we are forcing generation to accept and that in the generation's time
will cease to exist.
Which brings me to the first argument for guaranteed annual income: the
marketplace will always change. There are economists who summarize the market
as "it goes up, it goes down and nobody really knows why". Which
means, quite frankly, that we can never truly predict what the market will do.
But the one constant we can always bet on is that the world is moving forward;
it does not stay stagnant as time marches on and what that means is that our
market changes with it which means the jobs that are here today will cease to
exist tomorrow.
Which ultimately means that we can't bank on the jobs of today to be here
tomorrow. The marketplace is changing and will always change; we can't say that
20 years from or now 30 years from now, high school students will be working in
your local burger joint flipping burgers and working the till. Those jobs may
not exist for human beings anymore, as we build machines that flip the burgers
machines will take your order.
To summarize this point to absolute clarity, there is an idea in the
free-market that anyone who wants work can find it. Anyone who wants to be
productive has the opportunity to do. It's the sort of idea that grew out of
the 1950s fear of communism; it suggest opportunities are available for anyone
who has the courage to seek them and praises those with the ingenuity to pull
themselves up by their bootstraps. But as the market shrinks, opportunities
shrink with it. Ultimately, we are going to reach a point where we aren't going
to have jobs for every able-bodied citizen in our country, in our province, or
even in our cities, regardless of how much they may want to work.

So, here’s the
truth as we have it thus far: the market changes, and with it, jobs change. We
can’t stem this any more than we can command the tides to ebb and flow at will.
Which means that our economic policy should focus on creating new jobs, and
preparing communities for the day when established market conditions cease to
be established. This can be done through direct investment in training for
future jobs, or transition programs, or even just pushing for greater diversification
of the local market economy.

But, the market
is unpredictable. Up until a few years ago, service industry jobs were more or
less one of those kinds of jobs that was always going to be there. As noted
earlier, these jobs are no more secure than others thanks to technological
advancements. Technology is also only moving forward; how long until we have
functional, capable robots? In a service economy, in an industry like wait
staff, I imagine a robot would be appealing to a busy restaurant owner looking
for someone to bus or serve tables. Granted, we may be decades away from this
happening, but eventually we will reach a point where it becomes possible and
affordable.

Allow me to
explain the affordable part. Even if there is a huge forward cost for
purchasing one of these robots, the business no longer has wages to pay to an
employee. There’s no lost time for illness or training, though there may be the
occasional short circuit. Eventually, we will reach a point where these types
of specialized machines will be cheaper to purchase and use than an actual
employee. Take again, the example of the self-checkout. We are moving towards a
massive technological future, which isn’t a bad thing, but we need to start
preparing for it now.

Which brings me
to the second point I want to discuss, and it’s still a little removed from the
overall topic of a GAI but provides another part of the argument in favour of
it. And it’s a bit of an examination of the work that we ask people to do
today.

In many cases,
there is the notion of ‘busy work’. For those unfamiliar, busy work refers to
work which is meant to keep a worker busy yet doesn’t overly achieve anything.
I’ll give you an example. Let’s say that you’re a secretary in an office
building. Your boss is having a slow day, no meetings or trips out of the
office, and asks you do some filing.

Before you can
file anything, however, you must go through all the boxes of reports and remove
perforations from both sides of the paper. It’s well known in the office that once
these reports are filed, they are never taken out of records and almost never
called upon for review or use again.

It’s not exactly
inspiring work. In all reality, the boss is asking you to do it to keep you
busy and have the appearance of the staff doing something…You know, just in
case their boss should wonder by and see idle staff.

It doesn’t
really achieve anything, and will likely make most workers feel like their day
was a waste, but it’s designed to keep a worker busy. I could throw in some Marxian
line here about busy work, but I’ll leave that alone for now. I think most
people are happy to do work that they feel is contributing to their
organization, but even the most happy-go-lucky can-do worker is going to
spiritually die a little bit when made to do work that exists solely to keep
them busy.

And this brings
me back to another point, a lot of people are working in a job or career that
wasn’t exactly their plan. I don’t know many people who are 12 or 14, decided
that they wanted to be a wait staff person or a cashier their entire life. I
would like to point out that I’m not attacking those jobs, just in case someone
thinks I am, but rather highlighting that most people end up in jobs that
weren’t necessarily their first choice.

There’s quite a
few phrases about this; primarily, the notion of “Live to work, not work to
live.” The problem is, we’ve created an economy where the opposite is true.
Most Canadians, I would argue, are working to live and get by. The economic
record of the number of part-time jobs being created would seem to support this
argument. Jim Carrey, yes the actor, gave a commencement speech about this very
issue. He related how his father was uproariously funny, and how he could have
been successful as a comedian. Yet, he took a safe path and worked as an
accountant; which even though was a safe choice, led to a career where he was
eventually laid off and led to tough times for the family.

I mention this
to show prove the point; people tend to envision themselves doing some they
love to do. Whether that’s as an actor, a veterinarian, a mechanic, or
what-have-you; people want to spend their lives doing something they enjoy
doing, which is yet another reason why busy work is such an insipid presence in
life. Let’s take the wait staff, for a moment. While I don’t know anyone who
wanted to spend their life as a wait staff person, I do know people who wanted
own their own restaurant. And they approached it through the bottom up
mind-set, they worked as waiters and waitresses so that they would have the
knowledge of being front-line staff later on.

Whether or not
they will succeed in eventually owning their own restaurants, and whether those
businesses will be successful, remain to be seen. But there was still ambition.
They took a job to make a career out of it by gaining knowledge they thought
would be useful in the future. They didn’t expect to be a wait staff member ten
years from now. The sad truth is, however, that some of them likely still will
be.

As I mentioned
when talking about disappearing jobs from the economy, people like familiar.
Sometimes it’s easier to put those loftier ambitions aside and stick with what
they know. This is hardly a fault, as I think all of us are guilty of doing
this at some point in our life, but it certainly locks as person into the ‘work
to live’ trap.

Which brings me
to the argument that all of this section has been building up to: our current
economic model is something of a jobs trap.

I want you to
think a bit about the service economy again, and I swear I’m honestly not
picking on these jobs. The service economy, for the most part, is set up as an
introduction to work. These are jobs in stores, restaurants, and the like. For
want of a better word, they exist as experience jobs. These are jobs that are
typically filled by people looking to gain experience in the job market.
Essentially, these are jobs that seem to be filled by part-time employees;
primarily, high school students.

Think about your
local grocery store, or fast food place over the last twenty years. When I was
younger, these places were more or less staffed by a contingent from the local
high schools. They worked there until they graduated, and then they mostly
moved on. Supplementing the staff, were senior citizens. Generally, retirees
looking to supplement their income a little.

On the face of
it, when I was younger and in my mind now, the service economy existed as a
stop gap. It was meant to provide youth with experience, and to provide
experienced and now retired workers with a supplemental income.

Of course, there
have been a lot of changes in recent years. The economic downturn has made the
service economy less of a stop gap, and more of a necessity for many. Take
again those wait staff people I’m fond of mentioning. Even the ones who were
working to gain experience, to eventually open their own restaurant, may find
themselves unable to move on thanks to the weaker market. A job which was
supposed to have been temporary, now risks becoming permanent.

Add to that the
increased pressure from temporary foreign workers (which is a blog post in and
of itself, but we’ll talk a little about it here), and you can begin to see how
many people may very well feel trapped by their current circumstances. Which,
in turn, leads to stress. And stress, as we all know, can lead to a lot of bad
things; from medical conditions to that small flash of absent-mindedness that
leads to a work place accident.

So, here’s what
to take away from the second argument. The service economy has created a class
of worker in this country where people are no longer subject to their own
ambitions. It’s almost a tad reminiscent of the days of serfdom; in that people
aren’t able to really make their own decisions due to excessive limitations.
We’ve condemned entire groups of people to take jobs that were meant to be
experiencing building and temporary into life-long careers. And to make matters
worse, often times these jobs create ‘busy work’ for their employees. It’s bad
enough doing a job you don’t want to do, but it’s even worse when the job
consistently involves days of not contributing in any meaningful way.

Let’s review
both arguments briefly. Firstly, the job market is changing as new
technological advances spur it on. Careers that existed for decades are
disappearing, and right now most governments seem hell-bent on trying to
preserve disappearing jobs rather than focus on retraining and creating new
employment opportunities. Secondly, the service economy has moved from being a
stepping stone of experience for young workers and instead become a
life-support raft for those caught in the stream of a torrential marketplace.
Temporary jobs are becoming permanent careers, but as evidenced by the first
point, we are going to reach an epoch where these service industry jobs are
going to be hard to come by.

The marketplace
for so-called ‘unskilled’ workers is shrinking. There’s no denying that. And
once businesses have the opportunity to invest in a means of cutting wages and
lost time, they will do it. We cannot rely on lower paying service industry
jobs as we move towards a technological future. And it is with that in mind
that we finally come to the meat and potatoes of this post: the need for a
Guaranteed Annual Income (GAI).

As noted
earlier, Dauphin tried an experiment in GAI during the 1970s. The program
lasted less than a decade, and reports on the project have only been assembled
in the last couple of years. The primary source of reference on the successes
of the Mincome project, as it’s called, is Dr. Evelyn Forget whose final report
was published in 2011. [Source Material]

Dr. Forget’s
findings are pretty astonishing, which is why they deserve to be talked about
more than they have been.

We’ll start with
the reduction in labour. One criticism of GAI is that it provides incentive for
people to not seek employment; but firstly, let’s examine that criticism. Is
that really a bad thing? We’ve already talked about how we’ve created an
economy where people ‘work to live’, instead of ‘live to work’. We have a
perception that to be a productive and valued member of society, you must
contribute to the economy by working.

But I don’t think that perception is correct. As
noted, a lot of jobs employee people to engage in busy work. How does doing
something that exists solely to be done contribute to society or the economy?
If you must contribute, then clearly only our finest academic minds and those
who directly produce goods live up to that standard. And then, that means, a
lot of us are already excluded from being productive and valued in today’s
economy.

Effectively, as the market changes, we need to
change with it. And that means we need to re-examine our perspective and what
it means to be a productive member of society. If subscribe to a pure view of
capitalism, for example, you’d be productive simply by working and purchasing goods
to keep the economy moving. If you subscribed to a pure view of communism,
you’d be productive by working and sharing the fruits of that labour with your
fellow citizens. There are different definitions and perspectives at play, and
I don’t agree for one moment that choosing to work less due to a GAI is an
effective criticism of the whole program.

Furthermore, the nature of labour shortages have
changed. The temporary foreign worker program is a good present example of
this. And as we’ve talked about already, technological advances are going to
have a major impact on present jobs and labour shortages in the near future. To
pretend otherwise is to more or less reject the current premise of reality, so
we need to discuss and prepare for the future that lies ahead of us.

The other place where this criticism fails, is that
a well-designed GAI can provide incentive for people to remain in the
workplace. For example, if the GAI was $20,000 a year; provide a tax based
incentive for people who continue to work and make more than that. Perhaps
allow those who are working to receive a reduced tax rate, or completely negate
all taxes, on the first $20,000 earned in a fiscal year. A tax free $20,000 (or
at least a lower taxed amount), would allow those who did work and earn more in
a year to at benefit and give some incentive to work in order to supplement the
GAI with no tax penalty.

Furthermore, a GAI is not completely meant to
replace employment. At $20,000, a family of two adults would only be making
$40,000 a year. A GAI wouldn’t allow someone to lounge about all day and live a
life of luxury, it would just provide a basic amount which would ensure that
they could afford food, housing and other necessities. If they want three
vehicles and a summer cottage at the lake, they’re likely going to need to find
employment that would allow them to enhance their GAI to let them do so.

But back to Dr. Forget’s findings. She noted that
the two groups that tended to work less with Mincome in place were new mothers
and teenagers. Unsurprisingly, new mothers opted to work less in order to spend
time with their children; while teenagers to focus on school instead of working
to support their family.

The biggest impact of this specific was the fact
that more teenagers graduated from high school during the Mincome project. So,
there’s the first big piece of information to take from this. Students were
able to focus on their studies, not on helping to put food on the table, and it
had a correlation with the number of students graduating while the program was
in place.

Furthermore, there was a real benefit from people
who removed themselves from the marketplace. Right now, though it varies from
region to region in our large nation, the average right now is about 3 or 4 job
seekers per job opening. So, for every job posting there are 3 or 4 unemployed
people to fill that job. But with people able to selectively remove themselves
from the job seeking market, that number changes drastically.

Under Mincome, people who did continue to work were
given more opportunities to choose the type of work and field they worked in.
There’s complaints nowadays from my generation about ‘the Boomers’ who refuse
to retire and create career openings for the next generation; even though most
Boomers are staying working because after 2009, a lot of retirement plans went
right out the window for many. But a GAI would allow these people to retire,
comfortably, and ensure that people who wanted to work could find a career in
the field they want to be working in, not the field they’re stuck with.

Which brings us to the next point, and the one of
importance for those arguing a GAI has a major impact on the social
determinates of health. In addition to increasing opportunities for those who
wanted to work, Mincome had a profound impact on the health of those in
Dauphin. Forget’s findings show that hospital visits dropped 8.5% during the
period that Mincome was active. Furthermore, there were fewer incidents of
work-related injury, car accidents, domestic abuse, and a reduction in
psychiatric hospitalization and mental-illness related doctor’s visits.

Let me highlight some of those a little more.

We’ll start with the work-related injury. As I
noted above, someone working in a job they don’t enjoy is more likely to experience
stress. Stress is one of those things all of us have experienced, and we all
know that when we’re stressed, it’s quite taxing on the body and mind. And its
periods of stress that tend to lead to us performing at less than our best,
increasing the odds and chances for accidents.

This is especially true in the workplace; even for
someone who isn’t working in a regularly dangerous occupation. Whether you work
with power tools, or even something as innocuous as a damp floor, the
possibility for injury exists everywhere. And when we’re stressed, the odds of
getting involved in an injury only increase. So, obviously, the offer of GAI
helped to alleviate some of the stress involved with work.

Next car accidents. Commuting is now a way of life
for many, regardless of whether they want it to be or not. Current transit
problems in Saskatoon only highlight that when you need transportation to get
to work, and be cost effective, there aren’t always a lot of options. That’s
led to traffic congestion in a lot of our city centres and an increase in
rush-hour gridlock in cities across Canada. Patience is a virtue that is often
lost when you’ve only traveled a metre in ten minutes.

So, this leads to an increase in aggressive
driving. You’ll take a risk you wouldn’t normally take because you’re running
late; or, it is just stress rearing its head again. This, in turn, leads to a
potential increase in traffic accidents.

Add to this the case of Andy Ferguson, the student
intern who worked an unpaid internship for a local radio station. Andy had an
hour commute between his internship and home, and after putting in a morning
shift and an overnight shift, he was killed in a traffic accident on his way
home after his car veered into another lane and struck a gravel truck head on. [Source Material]

I mention this specific example for a few reasons.
Firstly, the intern thing is again further proof of how we are pushing people
into a ‘work to live’ situation. Ferguson was not paid for his internship, he
would instead receive college credit, which left him in a position where he
could not object to his working conditions due to putting that credit and his
degree at risk.

Secondly, it highlights what the commute has become
for those who work. Changes to the EI program are also a good example of this;
we are creating an economic system where there is a belief that an hour or more
commute each way is no big deal. However, that is adding to the stress related
to the market conditions that we are creating. An hour commute, at the best of
times barring traffic, is actually going to equal more time than that. If you
work at 9am, you’re probably up before 7am to get your day started. If you have
a family, especially one that includes school-aged kids, chances are you have a
lot to do before you can hit the road for the day. So, maybe, staying in bed
until just before 7 is especially optimistic.

The chances for sleep deprivation in this situation
is pretty high. Add stress, our famous Canadian winter weather, and a sleepy
driver and it is a recipe for disaster. Commuting is now a part of the work
experience, whether it’s an hour away or twenty minutes. Unless you live in a
very small community, you are likely driving at least ten minutes from home to
work, and then back.

More people working means more people commuting,
which means more people on the road and the greater a chance of accident. It’s
a pretty simple idea. As such, with a GAI that allows people to actively remove
themselves from the marketplace, there is a chance of reducing the number of
commuters during a given day.

Which brings us to the domestic abuse issue. I’m
not an expert on this field at all, and there are a lot of myths and conjecture
about the root causes of domestic abuse. There are those who say that stress
impacts a person’s decision to become physically or emotionally abusive against
a spouse or other family member; at the same time, there are those who reject
that domestic abuse can be explained so easily.

After all, there are hundreds of individuals under
tremendous stress that do not become abusive to others. Much in the same way
that there are individuals with substance abuse problems that also do not
engage in domestic abuse. At the same time, studies have been done that show
that domestic violence is higher in couples who are experience financial strain
and stress. [Source Material] In fact,
domestic violence rates in couples experience financial burden is around 9.5%,
compared to 2.7% of couples who are financially secure.

But ultimately, it varies from individual to individual.
Some people under stress will resort to physical or emotional violence against
their families; others will not. As such, I’m not entirely sure what to think
of Dr. Forget’s findings with regards to domestic violence. There’s a chance a
GAI could decrease domestic violence by easing financial burdens; but I
wouldn’t presume to think that it would be a solution to stopping the problem
entirely within Canada.

We’ll look at the mental health issues now. Again,
it comes back to stress. Depression and anxiety are issues that spiraling in
this country, and in the world in general, now. That’s not to say that these
conditions didn’t exist decades ago, they did, but we’re becoming more aware of
individuals who are suffering through them. Mental health advocacy still has a
long way to go, considering there is still a stigma surrounding those who
suffer from mental health issues, but it would seem that the GAI had a benefit
in this regard.

If you asked people what stressed them out the
most, or provided the most anxiety in their life, most of them would answer
money. Again, we’re back at working to live. As previously stated, individuals
are putting their ambitions on long-term hold in a perilous economy by staying
put in service economy jobs that are slowly becoming their careers. People
don’t do this because they enjoy the work, some might but the majority likely
not so much, they do it because at the end of the day they have to pay the
bills. Some people deal with it, and work through it, others have a harder time
of it.

Whether they end up crying themselves to sleep at night, or end up
breaking down in the middle of the shift, working in a job where you feel stuck
and trapped provides a tremendous amount of mental stress.

Add to that the state of precarious employment; or
working on a contract and not knowing whether or not you’ll have a job when
that contract is up, and people do have a lot to worry their minds. As such, a
GAI removes a lot of that doubt and also allows an individual to make a choice
in their career. They don’t have to suffer through a job that they do only to
pay the bills, they can take the time to get into a career that they will love
to do day in and day out.

That brings me to the educational advantages.

As stated earlier, teenagers during Mincome were
more likely to graduate. On top of that, the stay-at home parents had a
noticeable impact on their children during this time period. Children who came
from families who had parents staying at home were scoring higher on tests and
were less likely to drop out prior to graduation. There was also a marked
increase in adults seeking continued education during the Mincome experiment.

That means that the educational impact of a GAI was
very significant. I’ve always been a proponent of better education; in order to
function as democracy, you need an educated citizenry. And in that regard, it
would seem that Mincome worked fantastically as a means of allowing people to
become better educated. From a view of the social determinants of health, a
GAI is a boon that we should be exploring. Everything that’s been explored, by
Mincome and by academic review, suggest that this is a social program that
could have tremendous social impact. And for the sake of being absolutely
clear, I think we need to explore that social impact.

Think of the health care benefits. Forget showed
that there was an 8.5% drop in hospital visits during Mincome; imagine what
that number could be on a national scale. Our health care system is going to
undergo changes in the coming decade, and part of that is going to be figuring
out how to decrease the strain on our emergency rooms. From what we’ve seen in
Mincome, we have the potential to do that through a GAI.

We can lower the potential for work-place injury.
We can lessen the potential for commuter related traffic accidents. We can
diminish the mental health issues caused by stress, particularly financial
stress. And in the long run, we can have a positive impact on overall health.
Preventative health care is becoming more and more important, and guaranteeing
an equal access to healthier foods and living conditions only helps us be
proactive in preventing health issues rather than reactive.

I think that alone is worth the establishment of a
GAI in Canada.

But, now we come to the big part of it all: The
cost.

A lot of opponents of a GAI, once they lose the
social argument side, always retreat to the safety of the cost argument. As I
stated during the criticism of a GAI encouraging people not to work at all, a
well-designed GAI can provide a tax-based financial incentive to keep people
working. Furthermore, one needs to think of all the programs that are currently
administered by the federal and provincial governments within our social safety
net.

Things like EI, regional income assistance
programs, Canada Pension Plan (CPP), Old Age Security (OAS), Guaranteed Income
Supplement (GIS), and numerous other financial support programs would be shut
down and folded into the GAI. That means the dozens of smaller, situational
payments would be replaced by a single system that covered all Canadians. And
as stated before, this would be a bare minimum pay to ensure that an individual
could provide the necessities of life to them and their families.

Will it cost us more than the programs we are
running now? It’s possible. At the same time, though, given the positive
impacts on health that a GAI would have, it could save us money in other areas
and help to offset the entire thing. Ultimately, a GAI has a lot of benefits
for both the country and for the people who are living in it.

Every couple of years, Canada reaffirms its
commitment to eliminate poverty. We’ve done abysmally on this issue, for a
variety of reasons, but we have an option before us that could actually do
something about it. We could be the generation that eliminates poverty in
Canada and begin to lay the groundwork of establishing a healthier society by
eliminating the problems that poverty causes.

We have a chance to do something phenomenal and
make Canada a better place for all Canadians. It will not be simple, and I’m
sure we’ll have our challenges along the way, but the important things in life
are always the ones that take the courage to see through. And to use a quote I
probably use too often, from Tommy Douglas: “Courage, my friends; ‘tis not too
late to build a better world.” his
hallenges along the way, but the important things in life are always the ones
that take the conviction to see throu